Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources

Laura Sangha, Jonathan Willis, Laura Sangha, Jonathan Willis

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317222002
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: World History

Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources is an introduction to the rich treasury of source material available to students of early modern history. During this period, political development, economic and social change, rising literacy levels, and the success of the printing press, ensured that the State, the Church and the people generated texts and objects on an unprecedented scale. This book introduces students to the sources that survived to become indispensable primary material studied by historians.

After a wide-ranging introductory essay, part I of the book, 'Sources', takes the reader through seven key categories of primary material, including governmental, ecclesiastical and legal records, diaries and literary works, print, and visual and material sources. Each chapter addresses how different types of material were produced, whilst also pointing readers towards the most important and accessible physical and digital source collections. Part II, 'Histories', takes a thematic approach. Each chapter in this section explores the sources that are used to address major early modern themes, including political and popular cultures, the economy, science, religion, gender, warfare, and global exploration.

This collection of essays by leading historians in their respective fields showcases how practitioners research the early modern period, and is an invaluable resource for any student embarking on their studies of the early modern period.

Part I

Sources

1State Papers and related collections

Natalie Mears

There are few collections so vast and varied that manuscript ‘placards’, vilifying Mary Queen of Scots’ involvement in the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley, in 1567, jostle with news reports of hundreds of apprentices attacking a brothel in Worcester a century later, but such is the scale and depth of the State Papers, housed in The National Archives in London.¹ The State Papers are those documents, principally papers of successive Principal Secretaries to the monarch, that were collected together in the State Paper Office from the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. They comprise 107 separate classes, divided into Domestic, Scotland, Ireland and Foreign series (the latter divided by country from 1577) stretching over 13,000 volumes, bundles and cases, and totalling millions of documents and many maps.² The collection largely covers the period from 1509 to 1780, but contains manuscripts dating as early as 1231 and as late as 1888. A separate set of State Papers – State Papers Colonial, comprising the State Papers themselves, as well as the records of the Privy Council and Board of Trade relating to the American colonies and the West Indies, from 1574 to 1782 – are gathered in a separate collection: the Colonial Office.

As will soon become apparent, however, while the State Papers might seem a comprehensive, coherent, distinct and official collection, that is far from the case. It is, in many ways, a rather haphazard collection built up from what the keepers could obtain from successive Principal Secretaries and could prevent from being ‘permanently borrowed’ by both politicians and enthusiastic collectors. The collections need to be combined, particularly for those working on political and administrative history, not only with other departments in The National Archives (such as the Privy Council Office) but also, and perhaps more especially, with other collections, such as those in the British Library, private archives, local record offices and libraries abroad. These other archives contain not only whole or partial collections of Principal Secretaries that were not given to the State Paper Office but also the papers of other major and secondary figures.

With the growing availability of databases that include digitized images of documents, such as State Papers Online and The Cecil Papers, it is increasingly tempting for scholars to conduct their initial research through keyword searches and dip in and out of these electronic archives. This temptation needs to be avoided. Such a methodology presumes that all ‘relevant’ material will contain words that the researcher can identify at the start; it does not allow for the proper contextualization of search results; it does not allow for the important serendipitous find, and, simply, not all databases are designed to search for variant spellings. It remains essential for scholars to ‘know their archives’: not just what the collection contains, but how, why and by whom it was created and developed, and how it was organized and reorganized. This enables the researcher to know what they might find, explain why things are absent – and possibly point to where they are – and understand the documents contained therein better. For these reasons, this chapter will address the history of the State Paper Office and some of its allied collections, and it will discuss how these collections were ordered by contemporaries and later archivists. The chapter will then discuss some of the ‘finding aids’ for key collections – the catalogues and calendars that have been created by successive archivists and historians – including their strengths and pitfalls.

The history of the State Papers

The State Paper Office was founded by the Crown as a working archive that could be consulted during the formulation of policy. When the office was founded is not clear. Its establishment is commonly dated to 1578 but the interpretation of the evidence on which this is based – the memoirs of one of the first keepers, Sir Thomas Wilson – is open to question.³ Rather, it appears that the State Paper Office, and its organization, developed over many decades. By the late sixteenth century, the papers of former Principal Secretaries, and other important figures such as Cardinal Wolsey, were in the custody of the current Principal Secretary, alongside the records of the Signet Office and the Privy Council, and were overseen either by one of the Secretary’s own servants or one of the clerks of the Signet.⁴ By 1610, an official Keeper(s) was appointed, though they continued to be selected from those who had worked with the Principal Secretary or in the Signet Office.⁵

In maintaining a working archive, the Crown was not interested in preserving all of the papers of its Principal Secretaries, and personal items seem to have been weeded out. This probably explains why there are no personal papers belonging to Sir Francis Walsingham or William Davison in the collection, though many of their political papers are there.⁶ As late as 1705, papers ‘which are of no use or Curiosity [were] laid aside or burnt’.⁷ However, the completeness of the State Paper archives was also affected by several other factors. Some Principal Secretaries, and their families, did not want to give up their papers. Like most officers of the State, some saw their papers as private property. Others did not want their papers to reveal, posthumously, their political and financial corruption, and either retained or burned their archives. Some Keepers, such as William Boswell (Keeper from 1629), were more effective than others, such as Wilson, at acquiring Secretaries’ archives; some also received more support from the Crown and the Principal Secretary.

The unevenness of the State Papers between 1509 and the 1780s also needs to be seen in the light of what we might term ‘impersonal factors’. The first of these is the simple ebb and flow of government business: the abundance of material for the 1630s is partly because it was a decade of intense government activity. The second is any change in the structure and practice of governance: this could not only generate more documents, but could also place them beyond the reach of individuals who, as we have seen, may have been reluctant to relinquish possession. After the assassination of Lord Admiral Buckingham in 1628, control of the navy devolved to a commission whose members did not see its papers as their own personal property. Consequently, the commission’s archive moved seamlessly to the State Paper Office.

It should also be noted that not all The National Archives’ ‘State Papers’ are in the State Paper Office. First, the Colonial State Papers are in the Colonial Office. In the seventeenth century, Principal Secretaries had little involvement in the nascent British empire because most dealings between the Government and its colonies were handled either by committees of the Privy Council or by special commissions, such as the Committee for Foreign Plantations (1634–41), the Council for Trade (from 1660), the Council for Foreign Plantations (from 1660) and the Board of Trade (from 1695). This changed in the course of the eighteenth century, largely because of war, and, in 1768, a third Principal Secretary was appointed to deal with colonial matters. Though this position lapsed after the American War of Independence (and duties passed to the Home Office), it was revived in 1794 and the colonial business that had earlier been assumed by the Home Office was transferred back. Further developments in the nineteenth century meant that the Colonial Office built up its own archive, though one that overlapped with the Department of War, the Home Office and the Commonwealth Office.

Second, there are a number of other classes that contain ‘State Papers’. ‘Special Collections’, for instance, include the Ancient Correspondence (SC1), comprising sixty-two volumes of correspondence, drafts and memoranda from the twelfth century to the early sixteenth century gathered from the Chancery, Exchequer and Privy Seal Office. There are also collections of gifts and deposits (PRO30/1–99 and PRO44) and transcripts (PRO31/1–20), often from foreign archives, such as those made by M. Armand Baschet of correspondence relating to England from the French archives dating from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century (PRO31/3).

Other collections

As the State Papers in The National Archives are, therefore, neither complete nor comprehensive, it is necessary to look elsewhere as well. The other main collections of ‘State Papers’ are those in the British Library (particularly the Cotton, Harley, Lansdowne and Additional manuscripts); private archives, particularly those calendared by the Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC); major public archives (such as Lambeth Palace Library); local record offices; and archives and libraries abroad.⁸ These are not all ‘State Papers’ as defined by the State Paper Office’s remit: i.e. they are not all the papers of Principal Secretaries. Rather, they include the collections of a whole range of people who were involved, in varying capacities and in varying degrees, in the work of central government. Thus, they are part of what could be termed a ‘virtual archive’ of ‘State Papers’. There is not space to describe all of these collections in full, so this section will focus on the main collections and provide pointers to where other collections can be found.

The British Library’s Cotton collection was created by Sir Robert Cotton, an inveterate collector of manuscripts, and contains some of the papers of one of Elizabeth I’s favourites and Privy Councillors, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,⁹ as well as originals and copies of material that had been in the State Paper Office and that Cotton ‘borrowed’. There are also a significant number of scientific manuscripts. The Harley collection, created by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford and Lord Treasurer to Queen Anne, includes not only Harley’s own papers and those of his son (another manuscript collector), but also those of Elizabeth I’s Principal Secretary William Davison (who delivered Mary Queen of Scots’ execution warrant), and the MP and parliamentary writer, Sir Simonds D’Ewes. The Lansdowne manuscripts, largely the collection of Sir Michael Hickes, one of the secretaries of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Principal Secretary and Lord Treasurer to Elizabeth I), contain a very large proportion of Burghley’s papers. The Additional manuscripts include the very important Yelverton Papers of Robert Beale, one of the clerks of the Elizabethan Privy Council, and into which some of the papers of the MP and City Alderman, Thomas Norton, were absorbed.

There are a number of significant private archives of ‘State Papers’, most of which were examined by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (more commonly referred to as the Hi...